Ominous Parallels (12 page)

This debate is artificial. In essential terms,
both
these views are correct—because these two elements of the Nazi ethics are not antithetical. They are distinguishable but harmonious aspects of one unified creed: the worship of the group.

In their Nazi form, the difference between the two is a matter of emphasis, in the nature of a division of labor. The altruist element lays down the basic approach of the Nazi ethics. It establishes the ultimate end: the welfare of a specific group; and the primary virtue: sacrifice in that group’s behalf. The principle of altruism is not, however, a complete code of ethics. It does not state what constitutes the welfare of the group, or by what criteria this is to be gauged, or by what kinds of sacrifices on what kinds of occasions it is to be achieved; i.e., the altruist element, considered by itself, leaves open the specific means by which it is to be put into practice.

At this point the various derivatives of altruism take over and declare: the welfare of the group is anything it decrees, anything that satisfies its desires (subjectivism); what it decrees at present it may revoke in the future (relativism); the sacrifices that work today may fail tomorrow (pragmatism) ; no options may ever be foreclosed, anything goes (including brutality). In essence: altruism sets the end, and the rest gives a blank check to any means to that end. The one injects the note of fervent commitment to duty—the other, the note of unprincipled, Machiavellian realpolitik.

In the one capacity, the Nazi exudes the aura of an “idealist” —in the other, of an amoralist. But the truth is that the Nazis appeal to the particular nature of their end to derive and justify the means they use. The truth, the full truth about the Nazi ethical mentality, is the union of the two: the “idealism” defines the good abstractly, as the Nazis conceive it; the amoralism makes it possible to translate the abstraction into specific courses of action. The “idealism” validates the amoralism; the amoralism administers the “idealism.”

In their formulations of the two elements, the Nazis characteristically utter clashing contradictions: sacrifice is an absolute duty—there are no absolutes; Nazism stands for social justice—justice is a myth, might makes right; the Nazi is the only virtuous man—down with conscience, the party must be practical; etc. But, as in a similar situation in their epistemology, so in ethics: this sort of clash is entirely on the surface. The clash amounts to the following. The Nazi “idealism” declares : there are no moral principles to protect the individual; we can sacrifice anyone we choose—because we are acting in the name of the only real moral principle, the welfare of the group. The Nazi amoralism declares: there are no moral principles to protect the individual; we can sacrifice anyone we choose—because the group we represent is above moral principles. The actions in both cases are the same. So is the essential, operative moral philosophy.

In epistemology, there is no fundamental contradiction between dogmatism and pragmatism; similarly, in ethics, there is no fundamental contradiction between altruism and amoralism. In epistemology, the combination enables the Führer. to unite infallibility and “flexibility”; in ethics, it does an equivalent : it enables him to unite righteousness and nihilism.

In epistemology, the ultimate practical purpose of each element is the same. The purpose in ethics is the same, too: to wipe out the possibility of intellectual independence and thus ensure obedience to the Führer.

On what
moral
grounds, even in the privacy of his own mind, could a man, accepting the Nazi ethics, object to or resist any decree, no matter how brutal or monstrous, issued to him by the spokesman and embodiment of the Volk? On the grounds that the decree destroys his personal values—his goals, ambitions, happiness, life? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that he must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree visits suffering, expropriation, and death upon other men, who are innocent? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that they must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree violates his conscience, his independent moral judgment? Qua social subjectivist, he has been trained to the view that moral judgment is not his prerogative, but society’s. On the grounds that the decree violates his principles? Qua pragmatist, he has been trained to the view that whatever works, as judged by the Führer, is right. On the grounds that the decree commands an absolute evil, which must be fought to the end? Qua relativist, he has been trained to the view that there are no absolutes.

The true Nazi, the man who has been philosophically prepared by all these doctrines, understands his function. He is not to express himself, but to do his duty; not to uphold his desires, but to sacrifice them; not to raise moral questions, but to accept the answers given by others; not to cling to moral principles, but to adapt himself to the ever changing voice of the collective as it determines the purpose of his life and every means to that purpose. In the field of morality, the Nazi’s primary obligation is to renounce, to renounce his
self,
in the full, literal sense of the term: his values, in the name of society; his judgment, in the name of authority; his convictions, in the name of flexibility.

The Nazi metaphysics and epistemology preach
mind
-sacrifice, thereby removing facts and thought (-reality and reason) from the Führer’s path. The Nazi ethics completes the job: by preaching
self
-sacrifice, it removes morality from his path. The result is the destruction on every level of the possibility of individual self-assertion. The graduate of the Nazi epistemology asks: “Who am I to know?” His counterpart in ethics asks: “Who am I to know what is right?” Both give the same answer, the one absolute of their anti-absolutist mentality: “No man is an island. The Volk, or the Führer. knows best.” It

SS Captain Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, was asked at the Nuremberg trials what his feelings were on a certain day in August 1943, when he had personally stripped and then gassed eighty women at the Natzweiler camp. He replied : “I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.
That, by the way, was the way I was trained
.”
⁴³

If one fully understands this answer of Josef Kramer, in a manner that Kramer himself perhaps did not, if one understands “the way he was trained”—trained on the deepest of all levels, at the core of his person, i.e., trained
philosophically
—one need look no further for the explanation of Nazism. What other practical result could anyone expect from a man or a culture shaped to the roots by every imaginable variant of the soul-killing ideas of a century of mind-killing, ego-killing philosophy?

Most men, encountering Kant’s philosophy—and particularly his ethics—for the first time, regard it as inconceivable, as a perverted theory that no one could mean, live by, or ever attempt to translate into action. These same men usually regard Nazism—the actual practice of Nazism in Germany, in Poland, in the world—as inconceivable.

But in grammar, two negatives make a positive; and in a culture, in this case, two “inconceivables,” if seen in relation to each other, make luminous clarity.

The Nazis took the inconceivable in theory and applied it to men’s actual existence in the only way it could be done. They took the perversion in the realm of ideas and turned it into sacrificial furnaces in the realm of reality. Nothing else can explain the Nazi ideology. Nothing less can explain the Nazi practice.

He was a faithful Kantian, Adolph Eichmann told his Israeli judges. In all his bloody career, he said, he had helped some Jews only twice, and he apologized for these exceptions. “This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties,” writes Hannah Arendt,

damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions—this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘inclinations,’ whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his ‘duty.’

Most Germans, Miss Arendt observes, “must have been tempted not to murder,
not
to rob,
not
to let their neighbors go off to their doom.... But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”
⁴⁴

A nation taught, in the name of morality, to reject the pursuit of values can reach no other end-of-trail. Men without values are zombies or puppets—or Nazis.

The ranks of the Nazi movement were filled with mindless activists and nonideological brawlers, but, unknown to themselves, they acted and brawled in the service of a philosophy, the one to which the party leaders always remained faithful.

The leaders, too, were anti-intellectual. They said (in private) that Nazi ideology was merely an instrument for the control of the masses, but they never relinquished the instrument or changed its nature in any essential way. In regard to ideas, they were “pragmatic,” eclectic, whim-ridden—and single-minded. Guided in part by explicit understanding of the issues, and in larger part by unidentified emotional feel, they were prepared to switch everything about their creed, except its fundamentals.

The Nazi leaders kept rewriting the theory of Aryan racism, even, during the war, going so far as to make room beside the master race for the yellow-skinned Japanese. But they never tampered with the heart of the racist theory: the worship of the group; nor did they ever make room for that which would not fit into any of the theory’s variants: the independent individual. They presented themselves to the Germans as monarchists or, when more convenient, as radicals, as conservatives or as revolutionaries—but always as advocates of power, state power,
more
state power. They were theists or skeptics, idealists or materialists, dogmatists or pragmatists, but in every version they were avowed enemies of reason. They demanded self-sacrifice for the sake of the Führer or the race or the poor or the unwed mothers in the winter snow, but they demanded self-sacrifice.

“Providence,” said Hitler to Rauschning,

has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.
⁴⁵

Here he offers, if not the proper evaluation, then at least the correct order and the essential content of the Nazi philosophy, in epistemology, in ethics, in politics.

To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of
irrationalism.
To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of
altruism.
To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of
collectivism.

These three theories together constitute the essence of the Nazi philosophy, which never changed from the start of the movement to its end.

It has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals—which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal.

The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hit ler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it. They purport to find the roots of Nazism in anything—in any practical crisis or any crackpot ideologue buried in the interstices of German history—in anything except fundamental philosophic ideas, the ones openly championed all around us, the ones they themselves share. Then they are forced to admit that by their account the rise of Nazism is inexplicable.

One such scholar, after presenting Nazism as an outlandish version of a narrow nineteenth-century political theory (Social Darwinism), concludes as follows: “But that such a collection of ideas could capture the allegiance of millions of rational men and women will perhaps always remain something of a mystery.”
⁴⁶
If his account of the Nazi ideology were true, the success of Nazism would be more than “something of a mystery”; it would be wholly unintelligible.